Venture Concept No. 1

Traveling is great when planning and finding unique experiences is extremely easy. However, what happens when it's not easy and you don't find the things you want to do? 

Travelers everyday visit new and familiar cities with one common problem. They generally know one or two things they want to do in this city, however, they don't know the rest. With such little time in most cases, people want to see the most and get the most out of their trip. Locals provide a very distinct advantage over travel services and tourist oriented trips. They know where to go and what to see compared to other services provided. They are familiar with local cuisine and travel options that your typical travel guide wouldn't suggest.

Travel apps & websites such as yelp and trip-advisor offer excellent listings for businesses in every city in the world. They provide a list of the top destinations to see and the restaurants to try according to thousands of reviews. However, what they don't provide is an entire trip from start to finish with the traveler in mind. Yes, maybe that traveler wants to see all of these listings, however, efficiency, budget and time all play very large factors. 

The travel industry is extremely large and continues to grow at a rapid pace. More and more travel apps are being created to help meet these needs, however, no one has solved the problem of finding a trip for someone based on that travelers interests. There are currently apps that provided hundreds of trips, yet you, the traveler, has to go digging through these trips to find the right one for you and who you're traveling with. 

Tripo solves this problem by matching your interests to a trip, created by a local/travel expert that will help you get the most out of your trip. 

App Steps

1. Download Tripo from the Android or Apple Store

2. Sign in with facebook or email

3. Selet the city you would like to travel to

4. Select the dates you'll be traveling

5. Fill in your travel interests - Do you like Nightlife? Art? Music? Nature? Etc.

6. OPTIONAL - Choose a couple of the major destinations in that city that you know you want to see

= A set of trips appears in a user interface similar to Tinder. Each trip is presented as a map with the specific pins  identifying the exact stops along your journey. You can click on each pin to get more info. or swipe left to move onto the next trip or right if you like it and might possibly want to try it. 

*****Again, these aren't computer generated trips, they are trips created by people who live there and know what to do and where to go.

By providing travelers a simple and easy way to find experiences they normally wouldn't try, I believe we can completely change the way people travel. There has been several times in my life where I've visited a city for the first time and knew one or two things that I know I wanted to do. However, after doing these things, I realized that I wasn't utilizing my time in the most efficient manner and felt like I wasn't getting the most out of my trips.

Tripo will use a business model structured like yelp.  Yelp provides a free mobile application/website to it's users and makes money through advertising businesses listed on their app. These advertisements are known as sponsored ads that are pushed to the top of the yelp search page. We will use this same model, however, we will make the advertisements less 'bulky' and provide them in a different format. 

We will make the advertisements less bulky and more discrete by integrating them into a map pin. Map pins that have advertisements in them will be inserted to relevant trips that have other businesses near the one being advertised. 

By allowing free access to our app, I believe we can have an extremely large community of users. Through our 'free' format, we can create more value to the traveler. The ability to provide them a trip tailored to their specific interests at absolutely no cost to them is extremely powerful. 

The best part about all of this is that we aren't reinventing the wheel. The technology we are using has been around for years and the business listings and reviews are already readily available.  By using available technology and software, my company is reducing R&D costs and allows us to ship a product sooner. 

Some of the most successful companies in the world didn't create great things from scratch. These extraordinary companies took readily available resources and applied them to new applications to solve common problems that everyone shares. This is what I consider my unfair advantage - I have discovered a problem, opportunity and technology and found a way to use it to my advantage to help others. 

My team and I are currently developing tripo and will launch this summer. Once we have successfully launched our first version, we will begin working on integrating reservations, ticket sales and hotel/airbnb reservations into our app. 

In the next 5 years, I see myself still continuing to innovate tripo with an ultimate goal of helping travelers plan their trip from beginning to end in a quick manner. After successfully building tripo, I will take my earnings and become a venture capitalist to help other entrepreneurs fulfill their own dreams.  I absolutely love seeing young entrepreneurs continuing to innovate and launch revolutionary products. I think I'll be most happy when I can help others achieve this and watch them and their products grow.